On Male Sexuality

I haven't written far too long, but it’s not because I forgot about you. Quite the opposite. I’ve been reading a lot of material that I’m hoping to write about, and picking up even more from the library, and even drove around the state to go to a lecture*. What’s happened is I’ve gotten overloaded with material to write about. So today, rather than cover every possible detail of a book I read recently, I’m going to stick to a small portion of what the author talked about. The book I read was called Male Sexuality: Why Women Don’t Understand it (and Men Don’t Either) by Dr. Michael Bader.

This sets me up for an easy Master Bader joke, but I’d like to think I’m above that.

Bader is a psychoanalyst who uses his experiences dealing with clients to inform his opinion about a wide variety of things about male sexuality. As previously stated, he has a wide variety of opinions on all of this, but most of it comes from a fairly simple concept.

Bader believes that all of our (men and women) sexual proclivities come from what he calls pathogenic beliefs. A pathogenic belief as he describes it, is a belief about the world that is so firmly engrained that you may not know you hold it. Because he is rather Freudian in his approach**, he believes these come from our parents at a very young age. These beliefs come to shape what we consider to be truths about the way the whole world works, and they deeply affect our relationships, and more interestingly for people like me, our sex lives. He gives plenty examples of how this plays out in his patients’ lives. Unfortunately, most of these examples are fairly extreme. It’s expected that a lot of his patients that have large problems come from extremely messed up childhoods, but using only those examples makes it harder to apply to other lives. However, the broad trends he discusses seem to fit right in with people I know, even if they didn’t come from broken homes.

America's Most Wanted's dramatic re-enactment of a broken home.

One of the most basic ones he discusses is guilt over what he calls “sexual ruthlessness”. Now, this term may sound a bit worse than what he means. The term ruthless in this context is being borrowed from its definition in child psychology. A more fitting term might by selfishness, as it basically means to do something without experiencing undue worry about the other people involved. Now, you know I’m not arguing that we just do whatever we want in bed without caring about your partner, so I know you’ll let me finish explaining. What a healthy, sexually ruthless man can do is, say, enjoy a particular position without worrying about if she’s bored with it, or if he’s going too hard, or if she actually wants to be doing it anyway. Again, not that we should never ask any of these questions, but many people (and, Bader argues, men in particular) have a hard time EVER ignoring this voice, which dramatically gets in the way of pleasure.

He says that men have this guilt in particular because men are forced to go through a different experience growing up. He argues that while every child has to separate from the mother and become a different person, males have the extra step of becoming a male, and needing to assert their male-ness. What this means is that men are forced to do more work to distinguish themselves as male, which can lead to a bigger risk of being emotionally cut off. This might sound a little crazy, and it admittedly takes some getting used to as an idea, but honestly, I think it can make sense even without the Freudian have-to-leave-your-mother business. Basically, cultural forces have a huge impact on the psyche of both men and women. We talk all the time about the media giving unrealistic expectations about women’s appearance, but just as prevalent are ideas about masculinity and what that means. I’m not talking about the beer ad ideas of masculinity, but what a lot of men end up hearing from women throughout their lives and, most damagingly, sometimes from their mothers.

Now remember, Timmy: I don't like sex with your father, so that means that no woman will ever want to have sex with you, either.

We hear things like women only putting up with sex to get what they really want (this one is damaging to both genders, of course), or that guys are creeps for looking at a woman or asking for her number, or any number of other things. I’m not arguing there are no creeps. What I’m arguing is that there are a huge number of men who are not creepy, but are terrified of being creeps, and have a much harder time being able to do normal things, like talk to a strange woman, or enjoy sex. I’m not sure if it’s because of the plethora of feminist literature I’ve read, but I know I find myself in that position sometimes. I think about talking to a girl at a party, or any number of other situations, and hesitate, thinking I don’t want to be an asshole/creep. When I take a step back and look at the situation objectively, I realize there’s nothing wrong with what I want to do, but the worry often keeps me from looking at the situation rationally. This fear has also, I’ve realized, affected my taste in women to an extent, as well. Though when I’m in a relationship I tend to be very grounded, attached, and SOMETHING, I have a strong tendency towards very independent women. It’s not a stretch at all to imagine that I appreciate strong women in part to quell my worries that I would be oppressing them by being my usual male self.

I know it may be a bit hard to believe that men have a hard time feeling okay being masculine, especially if you’re a woman that has dealt with your share of creepy/asshole men, but as soon as I read this hypothesis, it instantly rang true for me.

So! What does this have to do with how it affects your sex life? Well, one of Bader’s most important arguments is that people use fantasies to negate their pathogenic beliefs. An obvious example of this is men who prefer to be dominated. If they are worried that they are hurting the woman, or if the woman is actually enjoying it using traditional gender roles during sex, what better way to ease his worries than to have the woman do all the work?

This basic concept helps explain a huge bit of mainstream porn. There is no question that a large percentage of mainstream porn is aggressive. If you took just this bit of information, you might argue that men are inherently misogynistic, or that they wish they could be aggressive or even violent with women all the time. There is an important component missing from this view, however. It is the fact that with few exceptions, the women all appear to be enjoying themselves to what is usually an exaggerating degree. The women yell out in a way that would make you question the sanity of your partner if she started doing it. They seem to have orgasms every few minutes, even though nothing ever touches their clitoris. This is not to say that there is no porn out there in which the woman does not appear to be enjoying herself at all***, but mainstream, popular porn is full of enthusiastic women. What this tells us is not that we don’t want women to not enjoy themselves; we want women to enjoy themselves quite a bit, even when we’re being ruthless. Since many men worry that the things they want to do in bed are either weird, kinky, or degrading, having women who are clearly enjoying themselves no matter what helps negate that worry and allows these men to become aroused.

The worries don’t always have to be just about manliness, of course. Another common pathogenic belief (or so argues Dr. Bader) is that men can feel that having desires is cumbersome upon their partner, and expressing these desires is a burden for them. This results in men feeling like a chore when they consider asking their partner to try something, even if it’s something their partner may want to do.

Things like this.

These are only a few examples, but they are especially poignant ones, and they are ones that make a lot of sense to me. Maybe this is because they most closely relate to me, or because I have heard stories of similar situations, or just because it seems to fit in with my own ideas about masculinity. At any rate, he clearly has a lot more to say about these and other issues, but this is a primer and an insight into some of the most interesting parts of what Bader has to say. I don't agree with all of it, but I agree with enough of it that this was a very worthwhile find for me.

I'm planning to get back into reading and writing soon, so bug me about it!

*Well, two, but the second one filled up before I got there. I was PISSED. More on that in a later post, probably.

**In case you didn’t know, we don’t actually like Freud. This is something I’m hoping to talk about soon as well. Though in this case, I think Bader is probably right in his thoughts.

***Though Bader argues that even if they're not LOOKING like they're enjoying it (BDSM subs are rarely beacons of sunshine) women agreeing to be in the porn is complicit consent/enthusiasm. That point is more arguable, but still valid to a degree, I think.

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